The neoliberal rationality, which in recent
decades has imposed its dominance on all areas of life, persuades us of the
benefits of private property as a structuring element of our reality, even
beyond the strictly economic. We have become used ‒as if it were a natural
phenomenon‒ to understanding that the territory, all kind of resources or the
bodies, as a labour and emotional force, must necessarily have an individual
owner ‒ and here I mean both natural and legal persons (mercantile companies),
in a process of totalising the world's privatisation. Since the time of the
original or primitive accumulation, back in the 14th century and described by
Karl Marx in the first book of Capital
as a precondition for the emergence of the capitalist system, privatization
technologies and their consequences on the subjective configuration have not
ceased to spread globally. Later, and linked to the triumph of the bourgeois
conscience of the world, private property would be enshrined as a fundamental
right, underpinning the aforementioned process, as expressed in article 17 of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen, adopted by the French National Constituent Assembly in
1789, and later also in article 17 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the
General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948.

Leaving aside the debate on whether, as is the
case with a large number of formal and abstract declarations of rights, the
application of these guidelines is de
facto governed by a constitutive principle of inequality, we can observe
how the system of private property is based on a source whose legitimacy is
more than reasonably questionable, especially at a time when everything is
likely to fall into the territory of the private sphere. In this sense,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon published in 1840
What is Property? or a research on the principle of law and government,
where he categorically states that "property is theft". Proudhon,
however, will distinguish between property as tyranny, which is most widespread
and consists of the possession of land (or, by extension, any other means of
production or life), and that which preserves freedom, associated with the
product of the individual's labour. If the property, the tyrannical property,
is a theft, it is not accessible without violence. It is precisely in violence
that Walter Benjamin, in Towards a
Critique of Violence, 1921, made gravitate both the establishment and the
maintenance of law, which obviously includes property. One cannot imagine the
privatization of spaces and resources without an original exercise in violence
that must be maintained for their conservation. Such circumstance will always
raise suspicions about the natural legitimacy of the ownership principle. An
example of this is the forced expropriation of medieval communal lands as a
consequence of the primitive accumulation and the wave of repression suffered
by European peasants who, in one way or another, resisted this process.

In her book
Caliban and the Witch, Women, Body and Original Accumulation (2010), Silvia
Federici analyses how a large number of the processes of witchcraft, which
invariably ended in torture and bloody executions and for which women were
especially condemned, were motivated mainly by their opposition to the
privatisation of uncultivated lands, forests, mountains and lakes that provided
them with their own sustenance and, once the process of accumulation was
advanced in the 16th and 17th centuries, by the attacks on private property
caused precisely by this dispossession. By the 16th century, the nobility and
the rich English peasants had already appropriated a large part of the communal
lands through the "enclosure" mechanism. The possibility of a certain
self-sufficiency of survival would be practically closed without the mediation
of the private property system. Federici comments on how this process has been
repeated in other historical and geographical moments, highlighting the example
of Nigeria which, between 1984 and 1986, was forced to apply a programme of
economic adjustments, imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank, which was aimed at the destruction of the last vestiges of property and
communal relations, in order to implement a model of intensive exploitation.

Gradually, as this privatizing phenomenon has
progressed, communal forms of property and cooperative lifestyles, not
explicitly hierarchical, have been abandoned, not without resistance as it has
been indicated, thanks to the successive waves of repression and the
ideological formatting of the populations, and the idea that what is not
subject to private property is necessarily badly managed or, as a consequence
of this lack of economic efficiency, sooner or later, falls into neglect.

These arguments are not exactly new. During the
insurrection of the Paris Commune in 1871, when the notion of private property
in favour of collective property was deeply questioned in practice, the
provisional government of the Third French Republic, installed in Versailles
and presided over by the infamous representative of the order Adolphe Thiers,
launched a propaganda campaign against the communal people based on the idea
that a communal system could only bring about the distribution of misery. In
opposition to these approaches, the notion of"communal luxury" will
be proposed, which will appear in the Manifesto of the Federation of Commune
Artists written by Eugène Pottier, author of
The International. Community luxury" will be referred to, as Kristin
Ross argues, in Community Luxury. The
political imaginary of the Paris Commune (2016), a way of sharing all the
best, to equality in abundance.

Another risk pointed out by those who distrust
the self-management of common goods, in connection with the aforementioned idea
of abundance, is precisely over-exploitation or, in more extreme cases, its
destruction, if there is no direct intervention by the State or individual
private interest. This is the position expressed by Garrett Hardin in his 1968
article Tragedy of the Commons, which
years later, in 1990, was refuted by Elinor Ostrom in The Government of the Commons. The evolution of collective action
institutions. Ostrom, from a much more ideologically tempered perspective
regarding private property than the anarcho-communist orientation that marked
the Commune, analyzed how the communal cooperative mechanisms of the Common Use
Resources (CUR) in many cases, diverse among themselves in relation to their
functioning and geographic-cultural location, were much more efficient and
sustainable than those of a centralized state or privatized type, by virtue of
certain forms of normative self-regulation of the communities. Possibly, as
Richard Sennett indicates in the second volume of his trilogy on the Homo Faber: Together. Rituals, pleasures and cooperation policy (2012), the
viability of the modes of Community cooperation revolves around their
orientation towards quality of life in the daily experience of individuals,
whose well-being depends on sustainable ways of relating to the social and
natural environment.

The superstition organized around the cult of
private property, always sanctioned by economic arguments of scientific
pretension, has led in recent times to the acceleration - once the population
is convinced of the supposed veracity of this narrative or simply accepts its
inevitability - of the privatizing machinery that, at present, reaches spaces
whose collective nature was unquestioned not so long ago. This applies not only
to public services but also to resources which, in the past, were not even
considered as such, given the openly commercial nature of the term, such as
water and air. These elements, which are essential for survival and were taken
for granted, are now at the heart of a"planetary civil war", as Hito Steyerl
calls it in his text Arte Duty Free: art
in the era of planetary civil war (2018), causing numerous conflicts in
various communities worldwide; the most prominent example regarding water is
found in Cochabamba (Bolivia).

Particularly interesting is the case of air,
which, despite the fact that its privatisation process is less developed, has
recently been the subject of economic speculation. Beyond the initiatives,
which could be considered anecdotal, such as the sale of fresh bottled air that
the Canadian company Vitality Air has introduced in the Chinese market, given
the high pollution rates of the Asian country, air quality management is under
negotiation. Since 2005, a mechanism called
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) has
been established under the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which establishes a
marketplace where corporations can obtain a range of carbon credits. Its
operation allows speculation by purchasing pollution quotas through these
bonds, which in turn are backed by the acquisition-privatization of forests (in
Latin America, Africa and Asia) by virtue of their power to absorb the
aforementioned polluting particles. This is a process of expropriation of
communal lands traditionally inhabited and cared for by indigenous peoples such
as the Lencas of Honduras who, for some time, have been denouncing and fighting
against this privatization of their territories. The voracious appetite of
a"disaster capitalism" (adopted by transnational corporations and
national governments), following Naomi Klein's terminology in The Shock Doctrine. The rise of disaster
capitalism (2007) promises to take economic advantage of any emergency
situation (the climate situation in this case), showing an apparently friendly
face of the neoliberal solver of global problems. And the latter provided that
there are no pockets of dissent in the face of privatisation measures, in which
case state and corporate violence will appear on the scene with the intensity
necessary to put them out.

The conflict over the ownership of the common
goods is, precisely and in relation to the above, the subject that articulates
the project carried out by Rubén Santiago who, under the title of OMEN (O Monte
É Noso in its original title), reflects on the collective experiences of the
use of forest in the context of Galicia and northern Portugal. In his work he
refers to the confrontation between the villagers of the Salcedo Mountains
(Pontevedra) and the Spanish Army over the occupation of some land for the
construction of a training base for the Airborne Infantry Brigade (Brilat)
known as the"Afghan village" because its function was to train the
troops for their participation in the war in Afghanistan as part of the NATO
mission

The management and use of these lands have
historically been linked to the local community, and since the 19th century
these ways of life have been heavily harassed by both the State and private
interests. This phenomenon can be traced back to the nineteenth-century
government expropriation in the framework of the so-called "liberal
revolutions"- which pretended to place these lands at the service of the
general interest (an abstraction that very often hides specific, material andparticular interests of the dominant
oligarchies)- to the planting of foreign species, such as eucalyptus, pine and
mimosa, for their exploitation in an industrial agricultural model during the
Franco regime. The collective forms, however, did not cease to be dormant and
were strongly visible from the communal protests against the establishment of
the aforementioned shooting range, starting in 2008. The neighbors finally won
this war, which beyond the disputed forest lands, faced two different
conceptions about the property; on the one had, its privatizing aspect and on
the other hand the communal and open to the participation nature of the
neighborsin the use and care of the
environment. The"Afghan village" was demolished and moved to other
land for which the Ministry of Defence pays a fee to the mountain community.
This victory of the local cooperative model, however, was not achieved without
strong resistance to the apparatus of systemic violence cited above, which
included a spectrum ranging from threats from the Ministry to direct repression
by the military police. Nowadays, the villagers have recovered their collective
rights over the mountains and are trying to erase the traces left by the
successive expropriatory waves, repopulating them with leafy species and
recently initiating projects that conserve and promote the rocky heritage of
the place.

Rubén Santiago uses this case to
elaborate a narrative that contradicts the inevitability of the process of
centralized or privatizing expropriation. Despite the fact that in this episode
the forces at odds were those of communal management and the State, we cannot
ignore the powerful private interests that were also at stake, if we take into
account the enormous dimension of private business linked to the contemporary
war, stimulated by the military-industrial complex. The OMEN project marks a
moment in history that deserves being told, especially in a context, such as
the present one, where cultural (ideological) warfare seems lost and there are
few gaps for the development of alternative ways of life to those proposed by
the neoliberal logic that governs us.

Rubén Santiago
tells us this story to be used in vital
practice and as he suggests in relation to the title of the project, OMEN
works as an acronym in Galician (as previously stated) whereas in English this
word refers to something that is likely to happen. A vision of what may happen,
beyond the narratives with hegemonic pretensions that strive to discredit
non-aligned vital postures. Perhaps telling other stories, united in constellations,
as Benjamin proposed in his 1940 text On
the Concept of History, can draw a landscape that allows us to imagine in a
radical way, other ways of living and relating to the world. This narrative
work, with more general analytical implications, is present in the work and
experience of Rubén Santiago. Aware of the very limits of the artistic, whose
action is limited to the symbolic, he does not seek neither to teach an
audience - which has often been treated as ignorant and passive by certain practices
of political and/or social art - nor to intervene in the construction of the
vital - as it has been often sought, for the greater glory of an exhausted art
system - from revitalising artistic alternatives in their relational or
collaborative variants. On the contrary, he uses, not without some distance,
the ornamental grammar of the decorative arts, which have traditionally
involved the forms of expression of the owner classes.

In the option chosen by Rubén Santiago, however,
we can recognize the importance of non-hegemonic narratives to stimulate,
rather than to illuminate or provoke transformations resulting from the direct
reaction to exposure to them, a productive imagination for life. The stories
are, in short, as symbolic beings, fundamental for defining the parameters of
possibility in which our life experience runs, since, as Eduardo Galeano
insisted in the presentations of his book
Los hijos de los días (2011), despite the fact that "the scientists
say that we are made of atoms (...) a little bird told me that we are made of
stories". But it could be added, as Ross said in relation to the Commune,
that"it is actions that produce dreams and ideas, and not the other way
around". This could also apply to the artistic projects that deal with these
stories and that, as in the case of OMEN, contribute, from a cooperative point
of view, to tracing those constellations of actions, turned into stories, that
allow us, like omens, to open up to other possibilities of the world.